A Female President? PAH!

Tomorrow is the day that Kamala Harris, as the president of the United States Senate, presides over the counting of the Electoral College ballots and the certification of her own presidential-election defeat, the fifth Vice President since 1836 to do so.

She had hoped to make history be becoming the first black woman and the first woman overall to take the presidential oath of office - on Martin Luther King Day, in a nice bit of coincidental symmetry.  (This is only the second time Martin Luther King Day has coincided with a presidential inauguration since it became a holiday in 1986.)  The fact that a racist and misogynistic bastard will be returning to the Oval Office instead makes the holiday seem sadly ironic.

Courtney Subramanian of BBC News has said that the reason Harris lost to Trump was because that the former and future President "has proven that his message and style appeals to a huge cross-section of Americans," citing his gains among black men, white women and Hispanics.  I don't buy it.  People may have voted for Trump in part because of inflation and illegal immigration, but I doubt they voted for tariffs,  tax cuts for the rich, trashing of the environmental laws, weaponization of the Justice Department, pardons for insurrectionists, jailing Liz Cheney and the two Adams, Kinzinger and Schiff, for investigating the Donald, or executing Mark Milley for treason.  

But they likely did vote against Harris because she's a woman.

I think it's time that we accept the idea that this is a patriarchal country where a Margaret Chase Smith cannot get elected President, as opposed to Great Britain, where a Margaret Thatcher can become prime minister.   Americans still can't get used to a woman in charge of the country's defense and national security, and they can't imagine a woman making the call on whether or not to use force and when to pivot to the complexities of diplomacy.  Chris Matthews recently suggested that maybe a center-left female leader isn't right for this country and that a woman like Thatcher, who leans more to the right, would have a better chance of winning the White House.  When I heard him say that, I thought he was possibly trying out a new career as a stand-up comic.  As the right-leaning party in the American-leaning two-party system, the Republican Party has less than zero interest in putting a woman at the top of its presidential ticket, as the failed candidacies, of Elizabeth Dole, Carly Fiorina, and the aforementioned Margaret Chase Smith (who ran for President in 1964) proved.  And even if a woman did win the Republican presidential nomination, feminist voters would not support her, mainly because they would see her conservative policy proposals as anti-woman, but also anti-poor, anti-middle class, and pro-business.  

The clearest evidence that Americans aren't ready for a female President and never will be is the fact that there have only been two female presidential nominees of major political parties - Harris and Hillary Clinton.  And Donald Trump defeated both of them.   

In other words, nominating Gretchen Whitmer for President in 2028 is the surest way the Democrats can hand the Presidency over to one James David Vance.  That, of course, is assuming there even is a presidential election in 2028 that has more than one candidate. And if there is only one candidate, it won't be Vance.   

As for tomorrow's electoral-vote certification, it promises to go much more smoothly with a lot less drama than last time.